Sparx EA

I’ve been playing around with a program called SPARX Enterprise Architect. It’s an advanced modelling tool that supports software development from mind-mapping to UML to code generation to BPEL.

It’s a really powerful tool, but sometimes you want to automate tasks or export your model into another tool. SPARX provides several tools to help with this, but they could be better documented than they are. To this end, I’ve created a few snippets to demonstrate their use:

Java Automation API

SPARX appears to be a COM or .NET shop, but they’ve been kind enough to give their API a Java wrapper. You can find it in your SPARX install directory (typically located under C:\Program Files (x86)\Sparx Systems\EA\Java API\). There are two files:

eaapi.jar: You’ll need to add this as an external JAR file in your java project.

SSJavaCOM.dll: Put this into your C:\Windows\system32\ directory.

Note: SPARX EA is a 32bit program, as is the API. To use it, you will need a 32bit JDK, even if your machine supports 64bit software.